14 Sep 2015

DK2 support has increased tremendously in the last couple weeks, with Betas of Flyinside (a DK2 driver for FSX) being released aswell as a new DK2 SDK with la de da fancy GPU support corresponding with a new Nvidia driver release. Thats 3 drivers all playing nicely for 75fps FSX in head tracked DK2 VR (virtual reality) (albiet with all the terrain and other effects turned down).

"The first one was with the thanos board, the second one with the dimension engineering kangaroos."

So theres 2 hardware solutions, thanos board which I believe works with x-sim as a PID and the dimension engineering kangaroos which are also a PID for DC motor controllers

There is x-sim, which is a data interface for FSX, although the DIY 6DOF Motion Platform above doesn’t necessarily say good things about the thanos board, which also has like 0 support on its website, get on that thanos. Which leads me to look for a hardware interface which will work with a quadrature encoder since thats a requirement

So I figure I need to learn about X-Sim and what it outputs, I need roll and pitch output, then I need a PID to work with the quadrature encoders to output to a motor driver. Then I can work out mass of the cockpit and torque requirements. How plane pitch/roll data aligns with torque requirements, then I can look into motor and gear selection, then I can look more seriously at motor driving PID firmware.

21 Sep 2014

I could possibly put the center of rotation axes behind the pilot, in order to make the sensation of lift when pitching up or down more real (requires a lot of torque for the pitch motor though, especially if not counter weighted).

I need to understand how the motion hardware will work with impossible angles, such as if I pitch straight down, roll 90 degrees, then I am unable to pitch up (this problem exists for all designs seemingly)?! Not sure how this is dealt with at the moment.

I’ve been looking through forums and youtube to try and find people who have made similar projects and until just now I was only able to find one example of a home built flight sim with full roll and pitch, the viper

I spoke to one of the makers of the Viper, Sam, who told me they were having trouble with torque requirements. So I’m weary of the weight of my design, I may need to lose my previous work of the electric seat adjuster, which alone weighs a few kg’s.

Stand off bracket connecting racing seat to seat rail.

7-7-14, Seat bracket:

Balancing the person in the sim will be done using an electric seat motor and rail set. The rail set provides balancing on 2 axis, vertical and horizontal. The rail set has mounting holes for a different seat, so I needed to design a bracket.

First Design, mild steel rectangular tube.

Attachment to rail set is by nut within the bracket, the nut is custom machined as described in the image below. Planning to implement a bar going across joining the two brackets as an anchor point for the anti-submarine 6 point harness. Also, tonight I watched lawn mower man. I all have to say is hrmmmm, about that

Both outside (computer inside with motor control signal going through inter connects):
-Roll motor current cables going through interconnects.
-Motor control data going out through slip-ring.
-Also requires power for computer coming in through slip ring.